


Annuit Cœptis

by wehdile



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Body Horror, Brief Inclusion of Lovecraft Mythos, Brief Mentions of Bill's Backstory, Gaslighting, Gen, Gore, Human Bill Cipher, The Nightmare Realm (Gravity Falls), Triangle Bill Cipher, unreality
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-20
Updated: 2017-12-21
Packaged: 2019-02-17 09:17:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13073835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wehdile/pseuds/wehdile
Summary: Weirdmageddon ends not with a bang but a whimper. Bill Cipher refuses to go down alone and accidentally drags Pinetree with him back to what’s left of the Nightmare Realm with a common goal in mind: getting back to Gravity Falls.





	1. fiat justitia ruat caelum

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> > let justice be done should the sky fall

If Bill Cipher had learned anything useful during the millennia spent watching humans stumble their way toward innovation, it was that their prophecies were usually flimsy shields. Thought up stories to protect themselves from the reality of eventual oblivion. Prophecies that applied to him, however, were always right because Bill Cipher wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty. Wasn’t afraid to scramble a few minds to gain dominion over realities adjacent to the Nightmare Realm.

Bill Cipher always got what he wanted.

Too bad he hadn’t taken the Pines family into consideration. There’s plenty of time to think on his little failing as he grappled with the Shacktron, newly grown limbs beating furiously against the barrier while simultaneously holding off a pincher dead set on gouging out what’s left of his eye. With the scrambled remains of said eye dribbling out over the lip of his eyelid, Bill risks a quick peek into the stained glass behind his throne only to catch sight of Fordsy and his crew scrambling to assemble the Zodiac. One blink later the view coming back in fractured shards that make it impossible to tell what’s going on. Bill guesses Sixer must have had a smart moment, breaking the glass to muddle his connection to his image. 

“Huh!” Bill’s eye rolls forward to face the Shacktron, able to taste the revulsion of the humans within on the tip of the tongue currently emerging from behind his eye. “It’s been fun, really, but I’ve got a date to keep.” Vision obscured, he blindly stretches his mouth wide and latches onto the barrier, uncaring of the electric shock it sends up his fangs. Pouring energy into his mass, Bill’s feet finds purchase on the ground and with a surge of action, he’s upright with the Shacktron grasped firmly in his mouth. He twirls, slamming the makeshift mecha into the ground with more than enough force to break one of its ramshackle legs, grins when someone sharp jabs at the corners of his mouth in a desperate bid for freedom.

He releases the Shacktron, foot coming down to rest on the barrier as he bites down again on a distinctly metallic and scaley tube, sparks sizzling in his mouth until his taste buds are thoroughly seared. “Yuck!” Annoying but a measly force field won't deter him like some common demon. The more he bites the weaker the barrier becomes until it flickers out without fanfare. With unfiltered access Bill bites randomly, half hoping he gets to chew up the infuriating humans piloting this mess.

Of course then he'd be picking human bones out of his teeth for weeks… Maybe he'll just liquefy them instead. Bill is halfway through chewing on a mouthful of splinters, planning the death of the humans within, when pain blossoms to life on his side. Cracked bricks slough off to expose the tender muscle to yet another blow from the Shacktron. He chokes on wood, howl strangled to an infuriated scream as he wheels to face a T-Rex head with a mouth stained gold. Bill’s jaw close before he has time to reflect on the nature of raw physical pain, teeth slicing clean through scales and thick muscle in a single sharp _snap_.

He spits back the decapitated reptile head, its weight and velocity more than enough to crash through the Shacktron’s roof. The mecha staggers and finally topples when Bill takes care of its other pesky leg with a well aimed blast. “HA!” Blowing smoke from the tip of his finger, Bill begins to feel the pain returning amidst his victory gloat. He topples himself without warning, throwing dust and debris every which way.

Bill lays prone on the rubble, sides heaving and gnarled coughs between quick snatces of air. “Who knew that a physical form would be such a pain?” he says to the sky, vaguely aware of fleeing humans by the sound of their fading screams. He doesn’t bother to hope his gang will take care of them, not intentionally at least. Deals were his schtick and he’d never specifically made a deal to bring those lackeys to Weirdmageddon. It had been more of a promise kind of deal and maybe, just maybe, he’d grown a little fond of them over the eons they spent destroying what was left of his dimension.

That was obviously his mistake.

Putting trust in anything but himself was a mistake he would never make a repeat of. Not if he lived through this and he _would_ live through this as soon as he reassembled most of his bricks. “Easier said than done… I’m gonna need a spa day after this,” Bill grumbles to the chewed up T-Rex head as he moves to stand. Sinew and nerve endings burn with the concoction of pain relievers and energy that Bill forces through his form with a flick of his eye. There's plenty of raw, chaotic energy to go around but having it sting with each reformed brick is excessive. Ever the plotter Bill muses on how best to eliminate pain from this dimension while he rockets towards the peak of the fearamid. Hell, he could always use Sixer and his family to test that particular theory!

The idea of torturing the Pines family reignites Bill’s good mood and his ecstasy only grows as the sound of arguing voices reaches his perch: Sixer and Fez bickering over something insipid. Bill's eye curves in a smile, hand settling firmly on the rim before he pulls himself up. This was just _too_ easy, almost took the fun out of his plan. Almost.

“Nice try Sixer, but it'll take more than your chummy shack to stop me, _BILL CIPH_ \- Hey!”

Instead of the chaos he anticipated, all twelve humans stand within their chalk outline, hands firmly grasped. Sixer and Fez are arguing but it isn't right. This isn't the future Bill had seen and he's struck mute for the few crucial seconds it takes for the circle to ignite with a brilliant blue glow.

Scream drowned in the screaming light that pierces the fearamid’s point, Bill surges through the opening with a renewed frenzy. Bricks gone blood red and forced aside to reveal dual gaping maws, he isn't fast enough to avoid the pull the circle. The sliver of a pupil darts across the dark void of his eye as Bill realizes he's suspended within the blue beam and completely powerless. Cut off from the raw chaos he brought into this pathetic dimension. Righteous fury burns through every molecule of his being, twisted upper half accompanied by the scrap of metallic teeth on brick to stare down Sixer with a look nothing short of murderous.

“ **STANFORD! FILBRICK! PINES!** ” Bill roars, punctuating each word with a shower of bricks, claws digging into the fearamid even as he's dragged upward. “ **I’LL KILL YOU STANFORD, ALL OF YOU! EACH AND EVERY ONE OF YOU MISERABLE HUMANS-!** ” Drowned out by the cacophony of normalcy fighting to reassert itself, Bill can't help his curiosity and rotates to see his fate. Somewhere above him the portal begins to howl, ultraviolet colors threatening to bleed through the thin rim between reality and nightmares. Beneath his hands the fearamid begins to disintegrate, and he can’t seem to grow enough arms to hold on to what’s rightfully his. “ **YOU THINK YOUR MEASLY ZODIAC IS GONNA GET RID OF ME, _ME_ , BILL CIPHER?! I’LL ALWAYS COME BACK, STANFORD! _ALWAYS!_** ” With a wet squelch he separates the bricks of his midsection to push through limbs half grown, fresh and exposed bone already beginning to fracture as he fights against the pull of the portal. Then one of his hands catches something _warm_ and _alive_ and he hears the high pitched scream of one Dipper Pines from between his fingers.

Bill’s eye curves up in delight even as his grip on the fearamid finally fails — and he lets go to a chorus of frantic screams from below. Opening his fist to gaze down at the tiny form of Dipper Pines, eyes bulging out of their sockets in terror, Bill can barely contain his ecstasy. “ **HEYA PINETREE, WANNA KNOW WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOUR PUNY MEAT BODY HITS PURE, UNFILTERED MATTER FROM THE NIGHTMARE REALM?!** ” He ignores the hunks of stone and mortar whizzing by them, doesn’t care how Pinetree clings to his thumb for dear life, and instead leans in until his eyelashes brush against Pinetree’s forehead.

“ **...NO IDEA! BUT IT’LL SURE BE FUN TO FIND OUT TOGETHER, HUH?!** ” Bill throws back his head and shrieks with laughter, broken arms torn away by the vortex as he’s dragged up and away from Gravity Falls. It’s excruciating of course, the expedient stripping of bricks and muscle and sinew and nerve endings flayed raw until he’s reduced to a construct of pure energy. But he doesn’t care, hardly notices, has an eye only for the sheer terror on Pinetree’s face when they hit the shrinking portal at full speed in a kaleidoscope explosion of colors.

Space compresses, bends to accommodate the chaotic energy of Bill Cipher and they hurtle across the rift where time and place have no meaning. Width ceases to matter and infinity stretches before Bill where the chaos a Nightmare Realm on the brink of collapse beckons him. He can’t pinpoint the exact moment the fabric of spacetime tears apart but his laughter echoes across the newly crafted void as they plummet, together, into oblivion.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Based on a dream I had that expanded into something more. Enjoy!


	2. magna est vis consuetudinis

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> > great is the power of habit

Unconsciousness was unfamiliar for a Dream Demon, and Bill awakens sufficiently annoyed by the lapse of consciousness. “Sheesh…” He doesn’t want to open his eye, just lay here on the floor wallowing in misery at his sorry state. Bricked flesh replaced by the buzzing hum of concentrated energy, he is innately able to recognize the swirling madness of the Nightmare Realm which serves to only worsen an already abyssal mood. Stanford’s puny dimension had nearly been his, Gravity Falls just a mere appetizer of what was to come. And even with all his planning it had all come to ruin, outmaneuvered by a bunch of chittering apes on the ideals of _friendship_ and _togetherness_. 

Frankly, it made Bill’s quake with anger. He springs to his feet and screams, screams, and screams some more. Screams in frustration that echoes into the deepest reaches of the void, gnashing teeth multiplying as spittle flies. “ ** _STANFORD PINES!_** ” he laments, barely recognizable as the composed equilateral triangle who orchestrated the greatest prison break in the history of the multiverse. Clutching at his sides, pupil blown wide, Bill prepares to blast the walkway beneath into oblivion with all his hatred for the Pines family poured into the mental command of _BANG!_

Nothing happened.

Instead, Bill spends several uncomfortable seconds staring down at the cobblestone, his screaming petering out into astonished silence.”What the–?” He blinks, tries again with the same result: a heaping load of nothing. Nada, squat, jackshit. “AAARRGH!” His fist slammed against a chunk of rubble blowing it into fragments that fly off the ledge where they serenely float away. Nearby debris receives the same treatment, meeting their demise at the end of Bill’s small but no less deadly fists. Not only has he— him! Bill Cipher!— that damn Zodiac must have siphoned away a fraction of his power to close the portal. It’s the only theory that makes an ion of sense and Bill clings to it like a lifeline.

Left a quivering mass on the now cleared walkway, eye screwed up in concentration, it's time to put all his infinite knowledge toward concocting a plan. If only Pinetree would quit screaming he wouldn’t have a pounding migraine— Wait. _Pinetree_.

Eye sliding across his axis in search of the human, Bill finally takes note of his surroundings. He's in one of the many fearamids dotting the Nightmare Realm, portions of the void beyond some newly made holes in the brickwork distorted into geometry that would make a mathematician weep in resignation. From within a section of that broken geometry— which just so happens to intersect with the staircase just in front of Bill— emanates Dipper’s screams, too indistinct to make out any individual plea.

"...That's new." Venturing forward Bill risk touching the shiny surface of iridescent purple and green, observes it distort with a ripple under the pressure of a finger. When no apparent structural changes manifest he can simply watch the space within contorts further in on itself although Dipper’s screams don’t grow anymore distant.

Rubbing his fingers together, Bill inspects the shimmering dust left behind with both sight and taste, and his eyelid screws up at the taste of putrid ozone on his tongue. “Ugh!" He gags, spitting multicolored flecks of saliva onto the obsidian brick. "Tacky too! Who signed off on this?” 

A quick, and alarmingly small, blue flame takes care of any residue before he starts a slow float down the tunnel of purple and green. It spirals and Bill readily follows the curvature, hands clasped behind his back in the picture of confidence. Though up, down, left and right have no meaning here he nearly collides with the sides of the tunnel a few too many times, like he’s some sort of single-form skin puppet. When he really does whack an elbow on the wall to have it flatten into a 2D image of said arm, it startles Bill so strongly he actually yelps. A full minute of shameful silence follows and when he isn't compressed into the second dimension, Bill silently thanks Axolotl that his crew isn’t around. He yanks free and moves on, this time mindful to keep both arms close to his side.

Whatever is going on doesn't bode well for Bill or the Nightmare Realm. While he has an idea on what that whatever is, it'll have to wait since Pinetree has just come into view. And oh boy if it isn’t a sight! Dipper Pines, sunk up to his waist in what passed as a ceiling, arms stuck straight out with a look on his face of utter horror. Bill hadn't thought the kid could get any sweatier but humans seemed to be proving him wrong as of late. He briefly adjusts his bowtie, clears his throat and makes his presence know with a signature “Heya!”

Pinetree shrieks like Bill’s sprouted another eye, face gone white and the skin around his eyes pulled back to give the appearance that they’re gonna tumble out of their sockets. It is not a good look and after a wince, Bill slaps a hand over his mouth. “Is that any way to greet your ‘ole pal Bill? I made sure you kept most of your molecules when we had our little rendezvous with the rift!” A boldfaced lie said with confidence might as well be truth or so Bill recalls being told. Not that he can remember the exact who which is normal.

To Dipper’s credit he pries Bill’s hand away, grimacing at the texture of otherworldly keratin. “ _You_ brought _me_ here! Here! To this, this nightmare!” Pinetree’s brow wrinkles before his eyes grows wider and both fists fly up in front of him. “Are you here to finish me off?!” There's a steely glaze over his eyes, teeth grit in a false show of determination that doesn't quite match the forced,upright posture, beads of sweat rolling down a flushed forehead.

 _You'll wish you were dead,_ is what Bill thinks but can't say. Not yet, not until he's squeezed every ounce of agony out of the kid’s paltry mind and body. “You wound me, Pinetree. I might have been a bit hasty but can ya blame me?” An arm snakes around Dipper’s shoulder, claws dug into the sleeve of his stupid shirt. “When my millennia long plan of turning your dimension into the biggest and greatest party in all the multiverse was derailed by a bunch of _hicks_?” Eye flashing his trademark iceberg blue, voice booming across multiple octaves simultaneously is all it takes to make Dipper shiver and Bill aches to push it. Really make the twerp squirm until he shatters into a million inconsequential pieces.

But a good con-man knows when to slacken the line, so Bill pulls away with a huff. “Lucky for you I'm in a forgiving mood. With a little finagling on my part and some of your whatever, we might just be able to salvage together an encore!”

As expected Dipper balks at the suggestion, jabbing a finger dangerously close to Bill’s narrowed eye. “Not a chance, Cipher! I might be trapped here with you but...but I won’t stop until you’re gone for good!” It’s less a threat, closer to a pep talk that somehow got blurted out in place of a witty one liner. It isn’t even worthy of a verbal response, Bill’s choice of retort to take up a steady float around the trapped Pinetree. He’s undeniably stuck and smart enough to know that trying to use a hand to free himself will flatten it just like his legs. Aka, a situation ripe for extortion and Bill only has to space out for a few seconds to think up his angle of approach.

“Good luck trying to ‘stop’ me in this sorry state.” Halting o float in front of Dipper, Bill makes a sweeping gesture at the flat image of legs above him. “It’s like you’ve never been two-dimensional before!” Adding a purposeful flourish to his wrists, both of Bill's arms plunge into the the second plane, hands planted firmly on the lustrous ceiling. With a grunt the rest of his body follows, a perfect translation of the golden triangle standing alongside Dipper’s trapped legs. A disorienting sensation that makes Bill want to upchuck his last martini but the amazement on Pinetree’s face reminds him to keep an unperturbed demeanor. “See?” he asks, clicking his heels together. "Easy peasy!”

“How can you– this is crazy! My legs are– I can’t feel my legs!” Overtaken by primal horror, Bill has the pleasure of watching Dipper tug at what’s left of his legs in the third dimension, fingernails leaving raw red marks on the skin.

Bill leans in, eye scrunched up in fake concentration. “Yeah, guess your human nerves don’t work right when they’re squished into two planes. Buuuut, on the other hand..." Back into the third dimension Bill goes only so he can jab Pinetree in the stomach. "You won’t have to worry about pain anymore seeing as how you'll be in unimaginable agony once all your organs get the same treatment!"

“What?! You mean, I’m gonna sink into the ground and turn 2D?!” Pinetree’s arms flail wildly until he latches onto Bill’s arm with a vice like grip, voice rising in both pitch and urgency. “Pull me out or something! Don’t just stand there and _watch_ –”

“Hands off the merchandise.” Jerking his arm back with a scoff, Bill wishes he had a top hat to adjust or a cane to twirl. Adjusting his bowtie again will have to do in the interim, gazing with an intensity that makes Pinetree flinch. “Bill Cipher doesn’t _do_ freebies. What do I get in return?”

A calm falls over Dipper that Bill hadn’t expected, cogs of his infinitesimally pathetic brain finally beginning to turn. To work out that he’s doomed if he doesn’t secede to Bill Cipher’s terms. If he had any capacity for empathy Bill might almost feel sorry for Dipper. Almost. “This is a one time offer, kid.” It seems prudent to speed up the process, giving a bewildered Dipper only a few minutes to come to the inevitable answer. “No recanting, no reneging, none of that. You go back on your word and–” a snap, sharp and clear “ –I’ll kill you.”

There it is. The threat hangs between them, Bill’s intentions laid out so clearly there’s no reason Dipper would refuse. It shows, that realization, in the way he swallows, hands brought over his chest to tie fingers into nervous, sweaty knots. The longer the silence drags on the more apparent it becomes that Pinetree is trying to draw Bill into a stalemate like Stanford is going to come swinging to the rescue any second now. No matter. A master of persuasion such as Bill could force a sucker’s hand one way or another. And, judging by the way the tunnel around them ripples, dark tar and smoke leaking from the right angles all around them, one of his trump cards has come into play.

“Ya know… There are worse things here then me,” Bill begins in a lazy drawl opposite to Dipper’s noise of surprise when he catches sight of the gathering smoke. “Things outside of time that were made to hunt out and kill humans. Introducing my favorite pack of roving timeless monstrosities, the Hounds of Tindalos!” On the echoes of Bill’s booming voice the hounds pour out en masse, elongated bodies jostling for space in the surge to emerge from their respective corners. Mouths unlatched to show a bottomless maw of rotating spikes that served for teeth, their many approximations of eyes move over Bill (an equilateral and their undisputed boss) to focus on Dipper who is the unknowing descendant of curves that so affronts their kind. Pinetree, predictably, screams and they go in for the kill, only halted by a thundering ‘HOLD IT’ from Cipher.

With a hmph, Bill swoops low over the hounds as if inspecting them, all too aware of the shallow gasps Dipper is taking over his shoulder. “These mangy mutts missed Weirdmageddon but I’m sure they wouldn’t pass up a chance for an after party snack.” He pats one on the head, hand briefly emulating the manner in which their form stutters through time, until a halfhearted snap has him withdraw with a laugh. “Whoa! Easy guys, you’ll get your snack soon.”

And slowly, ever so slowly turning to face Dipper, Bill blinks up at him. “Unless Pinetree wants to make a deal with a certain someone…?”

Dipper has no cards to play, his choice narrowed down to helping Bill or be torn to shreds. It should be a simple decision and the answer comes quick, Pinetree struggling not to fall apart under the unwavering gaze of the ravenous amalgams poised below.

“...Fine!” Bill’s eye curves upward in glee before abruptly turning down in annoyance as Pinetree continues with, _ugh_ , terms of agreement. “I’ll help you escape the Nightmare Realm if, and only if you leave me and my family– Mabel, Grunkle Stan, Stanford, my parents– alone!” Dipper throws out his arms wide, chin tilted up in defiance. “No maiming or killing or putting them in any time torture bubbles. Got it?”

Thousands of possible branches spring to Bill’s mind, their trajectories obfuscated by a now limited scope. But among them is a pathway that will allow him to bend those terms and that’s good enough for Bill. “It’s a deal!” he shouts, hand bathed in flame grasping the one outstretched to him by Dipper. A quick shake seals the deal, electricity coursing through their joined grip which bind them together until some minced terms here and an unfortunate ‘accidents’ there would cleanly sever it in twain.

Flames flickering out, Bill secures his grip on Dipper. “Now, about your little predicament… This'll hurt!” Glad he won’t have to listen to anymore girly screaming (except for the immediate future), Bill barely has to pull to wrench Dipper loose. Pinetree’s legs come free of the floor, reconstituting back into the third dimension with a _snap_ and _pop_ of bones and tissue regaining sorely needed width. The color drains from Pinetree’s face, screams muted by the excited howls from the hounds as their quarry fully comes into view.

Bill siwels on his axis, regarding the beasts with a cool gaze. “You guys still here? This kid is under Cipher jurisdiction now and if I catch ANY of you mutts so much as eyeballing him, I’ll knock you back so far in time you’ll end up as a curve! **NOW _SCRAM!_** ” His last instruction is punctuated with a quick change of show dressing; a red, multilimbed form he’d been saving for Weirdmageddon that suddenly fills the space to bare down on the mutts with a guttural roar. They scatter, fleeing back into the safety of corners without so much as a bark of insubordination.

It was hard to find good minions these days, Bill reflects and resumes standard size, seams of his cavernous mouths closing with the sound of a zipper being pulled. “They aren’t so bad once you show ‘em who’s boss. But they’re got this thing with curves, humans, the whole shebang.” Turning back to Pinetree reveals yet another frightful expression and more importantly, that the kid was floating without Bill’s assistance. Bill’s eye widens for a fraction of a second, the ramifications of dragging the twerp through the portal with him fully realized. Then that second passes and Bill prods Pinetree in the stomach, sending him floating back a few inches. “Neat trick, Pinetree!”

Tumbling head over heels, Dipper’s incompetence with the principles of levitation forces Bill to intervene lest he become a lifeless mural on the wall no matter how funny the spectacle was. Of course he has to drag the human along behind him by the hand, quite aware that the gesture was _not_ good for Bill's image as the avatar of madness. But the sudden emergence of a skill that mirrors Bill’s own was evidence that his theory hadn’t been entirely off base. No, instead of siphoning _away_ his powers, the Zodiac had instead siphoned some of that into Dipper Pines. How it had done that without splattering brain matter all over the fearamid was still up in the air since enough had been taken to render conjuration from Bill null and void. A glance back at Pinetree shows the kid has no idea what has transpired, dazzled by the variegated of the violation of both affine and metric geometry.

“Like it?” Caught off guard, Dipper starts hard enough that the tips of his toes graze the opalescent surface. Bill pulls him away certain doom with a chuckle, eye so scrunched up in amusement his eyelashes disappear between folds of brick. “Betcha old Fordsy never mentioned my superb interior decorating skills. Trust me, the fearamid you saw was just a taste of the decor here.”

Dipper shakes his head, adjusting the equally stupid hat atop his head with a nervous glance. “Um, not really... Bill? Where are we going anyway? How long is this...passageway?”

“Dunno!” That’s the truth for once, cleverly disguised beneath the lie that Bill has begun to carefully cultivate. “Time and space are meaningless here. Makes life for exciting if ya ask me.” The grimace Bill catches when he looks away is a clear sign Dipper did not ask, silence just another opening for Bill to plant more deceitful seeds. “In any case, we’re gonna see if any of my… _friends_ survived the trip. You’re gonna love ‘em, Pinetree, now that all that bad blood between us is good and dead.”

Dipper’s sarcasm is palatable, hat casting a glum shadow over his face. “Oh, goodie.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I tried to strike a balance between the cartoon violence of the show with the actual reality that Bill Cipher would gladly dissemble the molecules of anyone who got in his way, aka Dipper. Plus I wanted to throw in some Lovecraftian mythos. Enjoy!


End file.
